Aspies — the term is not really used anymore, but it was when my family became acquainted with the condition — are not neurotypical. Their brain’s wiring makes it easy for them to focus intensely on narrow interests, and they tend to be brilliant at the things that they focus on. Software development is a natural field for them. Microsoft even has a program to hire more people on the spectrum, because the neurological condition that makes many jobs difficult for them also makes them great programmers. They are detail-oriented, and can often see the logic in systems easier and quicker than others.

But there’s a hitch. From the Fast Company story linked to in the last graf:

What’s unorthodox about this, of course, isn’t just its setup. It also represents a novel, and potentially fraught, expansion of the idea of diversity. The impulse to hire more autistic employees is based on the same premise as hiring, say, women and people of color: Doing so not only welcomes in a wider range of creative and analytical talent, but brings more varied perspectives into an organization, and makes for a workforce that better reflects the general population of customers.

And yet, being autistic is considered a brain disorder, and it affects the way people process and communicate information—skills that are at the core of many white-collar professions. Adickman and his cohort were, in a sense, subjects in the third iteration of an ambitious experiment. Could the third-largest corporation in the world make the case that hiring and employing autistic people, with all their social and intellectual quirks, was good, not bad, for business?

People on the spectrum usually lack the ability that neurotypicals have to understand social signals, emotional cues, and social hierarchies. It’s not their fault; they just can’t see these things. Learning to live with someone on the spectrum requires you to show a lot of mercy and patience. Aspies often say things bluntly, but they mean no harm. And they tend to take things literally. For example, if the company they work for tells them that it values open expression, they may not understand that the company doesn’t mean that literally. The point is, it is very, very easy for people on the spectrum to step out of line, without meaning to. It is difficult for them to understand how things look to other people. This is not because they have bad character. It’s because of the way their brains are wired.

Another point: people on the spectrum tend to have a real problem dealing with disorder. This can manifest itself in different ways. For example, they can be acutely sensitive to injustice, real or perceived, and perseverate on particular instances of what they consider to be unfairness. To someone who doesn’t understand how the autism spectrum works, this can look like jerkiness. But it doesn’t seem that way to the person on the spectrum.

Does this have anything to do with James Damore and his case? I have no idea. Perhaps Damore is not on the spectrum. But I tell you this: I feel very sorry today for Google employees who are on the spectrum. They may have little to no intuitive feel for how the social, and social justice, hierarchy at the company works, and won’t know if something they think is unproblematic is actually stepping on a land mine. As microaggression obsession turns workplaces turn into neurotic hothouses, they become far more dangerous places for people on the spectrum, who are at a severe disadvantage navigating through these dangerous waters.

If Google (and other companies) really mean what they say about diversity, then they ought to be more sensitive to the particular social challenges faced by those employees on the spectrum. They ought to be teaching neurotypicals how to work productively with people on the spectrum — and that means giving them a lot of grace. Again, James Damore may not be one of those employees, but if he is on the spectrum, his memo — in its content, its language, and that he released it at all — would make total sense. And whether he is or isn’t on the spectrum, a lot of the people who work on the tech side of people surely are. They have now been put on notice by Damore’s firing that theirs is a hostile workplace environment for people who are not neurotypical.

This is something we ought to be talking about, beyond Google. I would love to hear from readers who are on the autism spectrum, about how they cope in the workplace, given how sensitive companies have become to “microaggressions,” and how unforgiving office culture is about transgressions.

UPDATE: Reader “Aspie In Massachusetts” comments:

I’m a former software and hardware tech writer who was fired from many jobs, essentially for being an Aspie. While I was considered as technically excellent and a good writer, I couldn’t pick up social cues.

Over the years, I made various comments that to me were neutral or even positive. Yet I was often told that my comments were offensive. I had no idea why.

Once I learned that I was an Aspie and was taught some social skills, I learned what to say and what not to say. But it was too late for me; I had been fired from so many tech writer jobs that I could no longer find another job.

From what I’ve seen and read of James Damore, I’m sure he’s an Aspie. I suspect that lots of men in high tech think the way he does but know not to say so in public.

So while I find Damore’s ideas repugnant, I also have compassion for him. I suspect he had no idea that what he wrote was offensive. Aspies’ brains are wired differently than those of neurotypicals. Therefore, what many neurotypicals perceive as bad character is really biologically caused lack of awareness.

Rather than firing Damore, I think he needs to be taught some social skills. He’s hardly the only sexist male in high tech. His problem was that he didn’t know not to express his ideas out loud.

Some further points:

* There’s a software company in Denmark that hires only Aspies, and it does very well.

* I don’t think that the issues of Asperger’s or social skills in the workplace have anything to do with right-wing and left-wing, so I wish people would stop framing it in those terms.

* Asperger’s is NOT a mental illness – – it’s a neurological difference. If a disproportionate number of Aspies suffer from anxiety and depression, it’s probably because neurotypical society treats us so badly.

* Those of us in the Asperger’s community still use the term Asperger’s. It’s a valid descriptor, and the DSM 5 committee that decided to eliminate the term was wrong.

UPDATE.2: Reader yahtzee:

This is a common discussion at Slate Star Codex, which has a high percentage of readers/commenters on the spectrum and a high percentage of Silicon Valley folks (with the obvious overlap).

What you’re saying here is exactly right: bright, red lines and clear, concise goals with measurable results are what make sense to people on the spectrum. Judging social cues, who’s in, who’s out with the boss, understanding (unspoken!) hierarchies, playing office politics; these are things that people with high emotional intelligence are better at.

Mix in a totalitarian, all-consuming religion that dominates social media and has colonized parts of the tech world, and you are creating an environment where the rules-based autistic folks are going to be eaten alive. The new inquisition is based on watching the right people and the right trends, and knowing when to declare that, not only are we at war with Eurasia. We’ve always been at war with Eurasia. And knowing to declare it loudly.

Oh, and another thing that trips up autistic folks: rule #1 about the social order is you can never talk about the rules of the social order, or acknowledge that it exists. Well, that’s not going to work, because talking about rules and order is pretty much a favorite pastime of people on the spectrum. It’s why Freddie DeBoer is always on the outs with the Twitterati on the left, because he’s slightly autistic and can’t follow rule #1.

The totalitarianizing left has enough problems trying to convert people with any sort of message other than the cudgel of fear. The idea that they’re going to wake the sleeping giant of tech-autists, and convince them that there’s no place for them in the utopia they’re trying to build is popcorn-worthy, to say the least.

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69 Responses to Google: A Hostile Workplace For Non-Neurotypicals?

I do not believe I am on the spectrum, but I went to a high school with at least 1/3 of my classmates at some point on that spectrum, have dear friends who are on the spectrum (we also knew it as Aspergers), and have married a man with very mild autism. One page into the ‘manifesto’ I was about 99% sure this man has some type of autism, likely undiagnosed, as his stunning lack of social caution hints at.

Mild autism/Aspergers causes people to state directly what they think without a social filter – on an individual level, I don’t think this is too much of a societal burden. It doesn’t take too much observation to see how their brain works and to suggest a correction, if you think it is appropriate, in a way that they can observe as a logical point. My autistic-learning friends and family are capable of amazing things that are beyond me as a neurotypical – taking advanced statistics without batting an eye, say, or losing 100 pounds and successfully keeping it off for over a dozen years (my husband measures every calorie, for every meal, every day, and will for the rest of his life). I believe society needs them and their particular type of brain, and for more than being tech monkeys too.

However there are two situations I would call dangerous for the autist – one, a situation in which they think that “logic” dictates a prejudice they have come to on their own, often from incomplete information about situational preconditions; and two, a situation in which they have to manage/be responsible for the shifting emotional needs of a large number of people (or alternatively a small one when the emotions are particularly heightened/sensitive).

The first situation is what I reflexively assumed the author was in – the movement to get more female engineers inconvenienced him in some way, even just philosophically, so he worked backwards and chose his logic to justify his own feelings. Aspies are in no way above this sort of thing (they are still human), but unlike neurotypicals, they do not have the ability to soften any aspect of the process, so it comes across as breathtakingly insulting and self-serving. An Aspie with an unkind preconception which he or she believes to be justified with ‘logic’ is totally capable of real cruelty and abuse of authority.

(On an individual level, though, I actually think Aspies are more amenable to a logic-based correction than a neurotypical. It’s possible the author could have been counseled out of this move by a sensitive neurotypical friend. Too late now, though.)

The second condition, though, is also probably part of it. I am pretty sure that the author is very competent at his base job – coding – and extremely pressured by his unspoken yet no less expected job, which is to combine technical excellence with Google’s desired social structure. Honestly the firing may be a good outcome overall for him. Google is not (or no longer?) a company that allows people (at his salary level) to hole up with their passion and only regularly interact with people who know them, which is the easiest social arrangement for an Aspie. Hopefully his next job will allow that.

The last thing, though, which it all hangs on: there are also growing numbers of people who use their mild mental condition (or pretending to have one) as a cover for outright rude, self-serving, or cruel behavior. Aspies are still capable of moral behavior, and just because they find some aspects of society difficult does not remove them from responsibility to consider moral angles. We will see his true diagnosis by whether or not he goes on multiple right-wing talk shows and basks in his 15 minutes of fame (a true autist would find this fantastically difficult). Time will tell.

Several people here seem to be implying that Damore himself released the memo to the public. This is false. The memo was distributed internally at Google via Google’s internal communication and social media platforms, where it went viral and generated a major controversy within the company. Then, “somehow”, the press got wind of its existence and soon Gizmodo got hold of the entire thing and published it. Now, considering the nature of the memo and the standard tactics of SJW leftists, which is more likely? That Damore leaked it himself (“Hey, you know what would make this a great weekend? Doxxing myself. BRING IT ON, TWITTER”), or that some self-righteous leftist did so hoping to generate enough outrage to get Damore fired?

Certainly, someone at Google got offended and leaked this to the press. And if Google were to fire that person too, it wouldn’t be any skin off my nose–they aired some dirty laundry, which will get you fired at most places. And since it doesn’t concern legal wrongdoing, no they aren’t a “whistleblower”.

OTOH, this was a public internal forum in a large company, read (or readable) by thousands of employees. This was not a hallway conversation that was expected to be private, or something that happened in a conference room, or anything like that. This was internal social media–which should have the same expectations of privacy as the external variety. And since it’s using Google’s systems, Google has a right to exercise editorial control over it, and/or be concerned about being held responsible for the content thereon.

So no, Damore was not “doxxed”–neither personal information, nor anything else he had a reasonable expectation of privacy about, was not published. If any party in this affair has a legitimate concern about its “privacy” being violated, it’s Google–which was placed in a no-win situation by the whole affair. (And I say that despite taking a dim view of the notion of corporate privacy and trade secret–a legal concept that needs to be narrowly construed, and generally shouldn’t include anything that is embarrassing but otherwise not required to be confidential for legal reasons, or otherwise affords a competitive advantage; and this meets neither test).

Are you suggesting that aspies might be more prone to e.g. potentially sexist attitudes, or certain disfavored political views, or other things that might get them in trouble with HR?

I don’t think that’s the case, but it may be. What is the case is that everyone has sexist or racist or political attitudes that could get us in trouble if we spoke without editing ourselves. And that’s the problem with aspies; they don’t know how to edit themselves to fit in with normative society. They say and do things simply because those are the thoughts and impulses going through their minds, and they don’t have the self-control or self-inhibition or sensitivity about social cues to keep it to themselves. If they do, it becomes very burdensome to them and problematic, and they feel suppressed and uncomfortable. And that’s what gets them into trouble with HR. But if HR could read everyone’s minds, we’d all be in just as much trouble.

As for “bros”, no, aspies are not the same as “bros”. In some ways, they are the opposites. They are the nerds that the bros always picked on and bullied. THey aren’t trying to dominate others the way bros might. They aren’t being offensive on purpose, in order to intimidate other people. They are just unfiltered, and not because they feel privileged, but because their neurology literally makes them that way.

I know a lot of people working in tech, and aspie and the spectrum is a huge deal there. Probably well more than half of the best workers have something going on like that. It makes tech a very socially awkward place to work in, even intolerable to some degree. Steve Jobs was not an exception. A lot of women find it very difficult to work in tech for this reason. And a factor not mentioned in the memo is the autism is many times more common in males than in females. That alone could account for much of the disparity in the coding and engineering fields.

Life is challenging for introverts generally. The ideas that a school or workplace should be loud ad a sign of dynamic creativity and that teams are inherently better than individual work makes things tough for those of us with quieter, more reflective temperaments.

As a *woman* on the autism spectrum, I just have to say that it’s tiresome to continually be lumped in with male Aspies (and actually, that word is widely used in the circles I’m in). Weren’t we just talking about biological differences between men and women? Well, it’s not like all that goes out the window when you walk into autism land. Most of what we “know” about autism is based on boys (and it’s largely outdated even then) because the traditional understanding )and by traditional,I mean from the ’50s) that only boys get autism (girls get diagnosed with a personality disorder or told to just stop being so emotional and difficult) so they’ve really only studied boys with autism. Talk about an echo chamber.

Anyway, you asked about how your autistic readers handle the work place. Ive never had a job I liked, and this is exceedingly painful for me because I have almost lost hope that I ever will find one. But it’s not because I have no intuition or can’t read social cues. It’s partly because I read *different* social cues and have an over-active intuition – the ones that make people uncomfortable, like who might trying to hide something, who might be lying, who is BSing, etc. – and can’t play along with all the office politics. It’s not that I don’t see them, it’s that I see *through* them but no reason to play along. Social norms are kind of ridiculous (you can write that off as an Aspie thing to say if you want but think about if I’m actually wrong first). The other reason I’m miserable at most jobs I’ve ever had is because people still assume “autistic” means stupid, especially outside the tech industry, and I’m continually given menial, mindless impossibly meaningless work with no hope of moving up or building my skills.

By the way, I’m awful at tech (fulfilling the women are biologicallly bad at computers ideology?) and am a published, award-winning poet (where’s your “people on the spectrum are literal” now?).

Actually, though, I don’t disagree with most of what you say here. And for God’s sake, we very much yes please need more grace and patience from NTs. I just also want to note that it’s sort of weird that this whole Google thing is about gender differences and then gender apparently is irrelevant for autistic people.

I imagine that autistic people are more prone to, innocentl, say offensive things, but also more prone to feel offended by innocent things (like the classical male banter). In the end, it is difficult to say if “political correctness” is a net loss or benefit for them.

Wow, is this interesting! I would bet a large sum that Mr. Damore is on the Asperger scale as it was my immediate thought upon reading the entire memo after seeing him speak… of course, I could be wrong… I think this is simply a case of a young man who cannot see himself as others do and is oblivious to social consequence, aspergers or no aspergers…

If you don’t understand why Damore wrote this, you probably have no idea what it is like to work for a corporation with an HR department in California. They are putting men through what amounts to a re-education camp.

The memo was essentially an exploration of Simon Baron Cohen’s work on systemizing. The google employees take is that basically Females and Males in technical roles are typically higher on his “systemizing” scale. Baren Cohen’s work has highlighted that the number of systemizers at the higher end of the scale has a major gender gap.

You need to be of a certain mindset or personality to sit at a computer screen for 6+ hours working on a couple of lines of code (well in reality making connections between thousands of lines of code / systems etc.). To reach the point of competence thousand and thousands of hours of this practice is necessary. A typically social personality usually can’t stand this isolation and exclusion of the real world referring to the work as “boring”.

I work in a technical environment. Despite appearances and how these environments are portrayed there is nothing particularly macho or “male” about the environment. Most are the quiet conscientious types and rarely socialise let alone talk to each other in the office.

Absolutely women are perfectly capable of completing this work, but the males AND females who do this work over a long time _tend_ to have and require these different personality traits. Baron Cohen has identified that there are less women who have these traits.

This does need serious open discussion and of course the only people to do so are those inside these places, who typically are male and also typically have autistic traits.

OK, I’ll out myself here: not only do I have two autism spectrum sons (one an Aspie, one full blown autism) but I would almost certainly be diagnosed with the condition myself.

I could easily imagine my Aspie son writing that memo. I don’t think he would be dumb enough to release it internally (he’s very conflict-averse) but the logic and marshaling of evidence is exactly the sort of thing he does well.

As for me, one of your commenters above noted that California based corporations are running what amounts to re-education camps. I work in a blue-state government agency that does the same thing. Our “equal opportunity” coordinator–you know, the guy who runs all the reverse discrimination programs?–has actually used the word re-education in his presentations to us. It makes me cringe, but after 25 years on the job, I’ve learned to keep my head down and my mouth shut.

One other thing to consider as a religious conservative–my experience with Aspergers people (me included) is that they have a really hard time taking theological arguments seriously. In Aquinas’ day, when “rule-based” thinking meant following your priest’s instructions, they may have thrived as monks or scribes. But now that rules are mostly based on observation of the world, they have a hard time with talk of spirits and things that you know with your heart and not your head.

yahtzee: “Oh, and another thing that trips up autistic folks: rule #1 about the social order is you can never talk about the rules of the social order, or acknowledge that it exists.”

VERY annoying, especially as a conservative college student at a liberal university. I remember one time my housemate was chiding me for violating others’ personal spaces. “Like when? How did I violate their space?” She wouldn’t give me a single example . . . *eyeroll emoji*

I get the feeling that James Damore is on the spectrum but also another feeling that his thoughts are a bit more sinister rather than an innocent social plunder. In his memo he put a lot of effort into trying not to sound sexist and racist while still making sexist claims and some racist implications based on the studies he cherry-picked. He was very subtle. The studies did not warrant the conclusions he came to about personality traits or how they would be suitable or unsuitable for certain roles in tech. That was just ‘his opinion’. He knew he was on slippery ice when he wrote the memo. His enthusiastic connection with the Youtube alt-right immediately after his firing also speaks for his character and interests. Not to mention that he so readily filed a labor complaint against Google. It doesn’t look like he wasn’t expecting some of it.

I have worked in tech with male engineers on the spectrum. I honestly found them quite frustrating to work with at the time but I don’t feel like they were bad people or meant badly. They just didn’t really take into account other people’s need for personal space or comfort. I was faced with them stepping on and tripping over social boundaries that felt a bit violating to me and some uncalled for criticism on unfinished projects at inappropriate times. It gave me a lot of stress and they liked to argue points even when I was clearly not interested. One guy would talk for ages without stopping or realizing the recipient wanted to leave the convo but was otherwise one of the most positive, upbeat persons in the workplace. Personalities differ.

“You need to be of a certain mindset or personality to sit at a computer screen for 6+ hours working on a couple of lines of code (well in reality making connections between thousands of lines of code / systems etc.). To reach the point of competence thousand and thousands of hours of this practice is necessary. A typically social personality usually can’t stand this isolation and exclusion of the real world referring to the work as “boring”.”

I would counter this a bit that jobs in the arts also include this same mindset. Graphic designers, 3D artists and game artists spend hours without breaks in front of the computer screen with their headphones on meticulously working on details or solving graphical problems. They get very immersed into it and it is the same with traditional arts. I wouldn’t consider this a trait for just aspies or engineer-type jobs. This is just an ability to concentrate on whatever you’re working on.